DUALITY: The World of Lies (15 page)

Daylight was fading. He hopped along on one
foot to a spot where his clothes lay in a pile. What had he been
thinking, swimming in that fetid place? He no longer felt at one
with nature, quite the opposite. It was now the manifestation of
some filthy demonic plane that sought to kill him. His pack had
once again been pilfered, the tea sachets torn open, and the Cloudy
Moss pod jar spilled out onto the forest floor. He had a wicked
impulse to smoke more of it to kill the pain. His whole nervous
system felt like it was on fire. The medicine would return him to
that golden realm where there was no pain and he could carry on,
but, he reminded himself, that golden realm is a lie! Wisely he
cast the hard won jar of pricey herb along with the pipe far into
the middle of the pond where it splashed down and artlessly sank
into the murky depths.

Thankfully his knife was honed to its fullest
sharpness. The bitemarks on his thigh were swollen and tender, and
he cried out in agony as he drew his blade deeply across them, then
twice again vertically. The blood flowed, and he opened and
squeezed at the gap til it gushed. He bled himself as much he
dared, until he felt faint. Then he salved and bandaged the wound.
He reckoned his treatment was in vain anyhow, since chances were
the venom had long since spread through his circulatory system. All
there was left to do was let it run its course and see if he came
out alive on the other side. This was not his first envenomation;
it was his third, but the first two had been quickly attended to,
and were of species whose poison was not prone to kill a creature
the size of a man -as that of watersnakes’ were.

The red lanterns of the night were already
making their debut in the heavens. He could not camp here. He had
no idea where he was, but it had to be some distance east of the
river. He tried to guess if he had veered more north or south in
his idiotic frolic, but couldn't be sure. Visibility was restricted
by dense woody growth, but by the shorter stouter stature of the
flora, he guessed he was not in a lowland as it appeared, but
rather a highland glen. There was no view in any direction. North,
east, and west the landscape ascended sharply. Eastward would take
him back to the gorge, but he had absolutely no sense of how far
he'd veered in longitude on his winding misadventure. His foot was
in great pain. He had impaled itself on a something jagged and
piercing, probably the sharp broken end of a wooden branch on the
pond floor when he had waded in and frolicked there. He bound his
foot with the last of his spare cloth and forced his boot on,
moaning in agony.

Hobbled or no, this stinking glen was no place
to make camp. The sky was clear, and with the bloodmoon Oberion
waxing full, there was ample redshine to light his way. He foraged
for a sturdy stick forking at the top to serve as a crutch. His
nervous system was going haywire, sending sudden random shocking
pains to different areas of his body. When they hit his chest he
gasped for breath and thought the poison had seized his heart, but
it was just acute nerve pain. It hit his face, his legs, no part of
his body was spared this shocking sting that was at times so
utterly debilitating he could do nothing more than collapse onto
the ground. His heart rate and respiration were highly elevated. He
was sweating and he felt his mind slipping more and more out of his
grasp.

He hobbled southward for lack of any of other
clear route. Perhaps further on he could get a view of the lowlands
and survey them for a route. Backtracking his previous way at night
would move at a snail's pace, and his mind was too crippled for the
task anyway. How could he retrace a winding path in the dark when
he could at most only think of one excruciating step at a time? One
thing was certain, the silver trail he'd followed with such great
faith had been a hallucination. As the cuts and scrapes of flesh
and robe attested, he had bushwacked it the entire way.

Gahre understood two awful facts about his
situation. First, there was no help out here in this uncharted
wilderness. In his wretched state it would take him a week to get
back to the King's Highway, if he could make it at all, which was
highly doubtful. Second, the toxins in his system would have to run
their course. Ingesting hot water might be of some help to flush
his organs. What he needed to find was a clear running water source
and station his recovery there, where he could boil all that was
needed to cleanse his wounds and wash his bandages for reuse, where
he could monitor himself against infection and somehow nurse his
own way back to health and full mobility.

He pressed on until the wet soppy terrain of
the glen rose and gave way to flat rocky ground. There would be a
ridge if he continued this way that could give him some bearing.
The toxin was saturating his mind, veering it into dark and deathly
visions. He could taste it: it filled his mouth and sinuses, subtle
at first, but developing into overwhelming persistent taint so
unnatural and horrid he'd do anything to rid himself of it. The
closest thing he could compare it to was pine, as if he had
consumed pine oil essence and its noxious fumes had permeated his
brain.

Then the abdominal pains set in at either side
below his ribcage, dull to aching, then to sharp, and from sharp to
unendurable. He doubled over. He vomited. His nervous system was
still shorting out and bursting thunderbolts along its channels. As
this cruel progression played out, he stopped fearing that each
attack would bring death, and began hoping that it would. The
combination of all these effects was more suffering than any human
body should ever have to endure. He did not know how he managed to
will himself to press on in spite of them. He may be dying, but he
was not dead yet, and he was pulling himself along by the faintest,
fragile thread of hope.

The hallucinations grew more vivid and
terrifying. He remembered the serpent that had threatened him on
the islet where the two rivers met before it slunk away. And now
recalled the other serpent swimming toward him in the water, how it
had wrapped its black glistening form around his leg, sunk its
fangs into his thigh, and injected its poison. He had stood there
smiling like a fool, doing nothing to defend himself and believing
all was well in the world. Serpents, serpents... they now roamed
everywhere, they covered the ground and drooped and fell from the
trees, all sizes and colors of them, writhing in all directions,
staring into him with cold gray eyes.

“Stop! Stop stop stop!!!” He commanded with
all his breath. The visions momentarily ceased. He reconciled
himself with reality to what small extent he could and surveyed his
environs. He indeed had reached a highland ledge. The dark redlit
panorama featured a forested view of lower lands, carpeted in
treetop. The land was flat east and west, but cleared on either
side of a hill. The canopy of the hill was indeed odd, for it
seemed to follow a neat parabola and was strangely uniform in
height. His mind started into visions again, but he focused the
will to dispel them. Something was very strange about this
landscape; something was not what it appeared to be.

Slowly it struck him. That was no hill. That
canopy was much higher than what surrounded it, and it was so
neatly curved and uniform because... it was a single tree! The
Great Oak! The etchings and tales of its grandeur had not been
exaggerated. Impossibly, its crest covered miles.

He didn't know whether or not to believe his
now frequently lying eyes, but the vision was stable and true; it
did not morph and phase like the hallucinations. He collapsed onto
the ground and with great strain removed his pack and lit from it a
candle. The filth of his hand marred the pages of the guide as he
flipped through them to the entry he sought. “The Great Oak is a
holy site to druids, Dharmaists, and numerous sects throughout
realms. It is a point of rare pilgrimage to only the most ardently
devout who are willing to face the many perils it takes to reach
this inhospitable and remote location of the deep southern
wilds.”

He closed the book. He prayed to Fo and God
and anyone else who might care to listen. Pilgrimage! If there were
pilgrimages, there might be shelters, stores of food, blankets,
medicine. The incline off the ridge was rocky but not exceedingly
steep. Gahre determined he could navigate this descent, and trudged
downward.

He was trembling in pain and reeling in
hallucination by the time he reached the lower woodlands. If he
stopped, they became worse, and he feared that to rest was to
succumb to death. The woods cleared where the massive root
structure of the Great Oak took over the terrain, its tendrils
weaving in and out of the earth. He walked beneath arches looping
30 meters high. The trunk of the tree loomed into view, and was so
large one's eyes had no sense of its roundness, but rather were
faced with a fortress of bark that served as the foundation for
gnarled branches as wide as grand rivers that wove their way so
high into heaven they seemed to support very Clouds of
Orion.

Gahre had never seen such a wondrous thing.
And if he had to die, he could not think of a better place than
this to do it. There were no signs of pilgrims or habitation among
the metropolis of winding roots. But there were animal signs and
caves and marshes and fields; a large and diverse ecosystem housed
by a single organism.

Yonder, a red beam from the sky broke through
the canopy and highlighted a section of root whereupon a figure
sat. Its silhouette appeared to be that of a Buddha, much like the
statues of the Dharma temples. He had prayed to Fo earlier, and
perhaps he been heard! He limped and tripped his way toward it, and
yes, it seemed to be a meditative figure carved from an upward root
spur. If his mind were lucid, it would surely have no idea how a
statue could save him, but it could no longer reason. A cloudy
thoughtless instinct drove him toward it for simple lack of any
other destination.

He desperately crawled through the living
nightmare of reptilian horrors projected in hallucination all
around him. When he reached the base of the statue, his eyes met
the woody feet of it carved in anatomical precision, though cracked
and covered in moss. With his last reserve of life-force he touched
the foot and willed his head up to see the serene face of the
Buddha, its eyes closed in placid meditation. At long last he felt
a flicker of relief.

Then those eyes abruptly shot wide
open.

T
he
Kinetic Dream was in close range of the target along with what
remained of the near probes. The sphere and the massive electrical
disturbance that surrounded it were cracking and flashing violently
on central holographic display. Mei felt the energy of it coursing
through her body, giving her renewed vigor.

The positive readings of the electric field
were off the chart, and their relative charge had risen
substantially just by entering the vicinity of it. What an
extraordinary feat to produce such an intense charge variance when
hovering just above the surface of a star! They were still building
charge, and their shield strength was increasing. It did nothing to
stop the thermal acceleration process ravaging the ship, however.
Yes, Mei had been telepathically monitoring the damage reports via
halo ever since she found out Aru had stopped, and System had
informed her that the probes could no longer be recalled to the
Kinetic by cause of the bay entry doors having been welded shut.
There were no heat sinks left; accelerated thermal seepage was
already at work degrading the inner hull that surrounded them. The
rarefied hydrogen ions were so plasmafied here that for the
nanofraction of a second their nucleus held an electron, it skimmed
by on the outermost energy shell of high density elements. Hydrogen
with the outer electron shell of uranium! It was another
observational first in this mission, but one that was slated to die
with it. Because no matter how Mei sliced it up, by any and all
objective assessment, they were completely and irrevocably
fucked.

It was possible to build charge on the Kinetic
by routing environmental energy to the internal quantum circuit
that perpetually flowed through the inner hull ring, just above
their heads. She had tried to recall the near probes to the Kinetic
for this task in the hopes of charging them enough to survive a
trip through the sphere's shielding and relay back more data. Since
that was no longer viable, she recalled two probes back into the
magnetosphere of the Kinetic and fired out highly insulated tether
cables for them to connect to. Once they were charged to the
Kinetic's full capacity she sent probe 4 forth to attempt a breach
of the sphere's force-field.

They watched this approach on the central
holograph. The probe sent back higher and higher voltage readings
as it delved deeper into the wide electric field of the sphere. As
it approached the force-shield, however, a jagged tendril of blue
lighting lashed out at it, and there was a mighty white flash
across the entire display. When it receded, all that remained of
the probe was a radial outline of an explosion composed of fine
debris particles.

“Shield Graze?” Aru offered. Mei had earlier
discounted this rare and risky maneuver, but now she reconsidered
it. In theory, if the Kinetic's force-shield came into contact with
the sphere's, a clear path would be opened for the probes with the
Kinetic taking the brunt of the discharge.

If there were any ship in the Taiji up to the
task, it was The Kinetic Dream. The Kinetic was an electrical
prodigy of a design, the pinnacle of Mnemtechian technology, but
from the readings of the sphere it was clear that Mnemtech's
grandest achievements still paled behind those of his creator
Logos. These two titans of the Machine World were pitting
themselves against one another in an epic test of technology. It
was ironic that neither entity had anyway to know such a contest
was occurring.